How does a sub hit an undersea mount? Maybe I missed this somewhere in the thread. Do they not have some sort of radar to detect these things or are they running blind based on charts to stay undetected?
They’re not exactly running blind. There’s a ton of background noise in the ocean. We have unbelievably sophisticated acoustic signal processing. The background noise is used as sonar. Unless they were running fast the background acoustics should let you see an obstruction. A nuclear submarine spends almost all of its time running slow so the reactors run on convection cooling. Without the pumps running the submarine is quieter than the ambient background noise. The seas around China are shallow and rivers even more constricted and shallow. Running into an uncharted sea mount is a possibility but I’m guessing it was man made whatever the boat hit or was hit by. The fact that they wanted to wait until the boat was back to Guam to acknowledge the problem tells me they really didn’t want to reveal where the boat had been. Keep unwanted eyes from tracking it back to where the incident happened.
